For many people, cellular phones, tablet computers, personal digital assistants, and various other mobile computing devices are playing increasingly important functions in their everyday lives. More and more people, for instance, use mobile computing devices while at home, at work, at school, or while traveling, to create, analyze, organize, consume, and communicate all manner of digital content with various other users of such devices.
These interconnected communication systems and device enable users to create, share, and/or organize data between multiple users and/or groups of users.
Each day, people go through any number of trusted interactions with other people, many of who are strangers. Examples of these interactions include: getting into a taxicab; going on a first date; meeting a real estate agent to see a house; buying/selling goods over the Internet; taking a tour; renting a room in someone's house. In addition, people can observe strangers interacting in ways that might attract attention, such as a public arrest, or public bullying, or fighting. In most cases, such interactions proceed amicably and/or as expected, without undue incident. Occasionally, however, unforeseen events take place, for example if one party or the other breaches an agreement (explicit or unspoken), or acts in an unsavory or unexpected manner. When things do not end as expected, it is usually a case of bad intentions meeting an opportunity to proceed, and in many cases, to proceed without anyone else having knowledge of the scenario. In other words, bad actors are more likely to act if they believe they will not be caught.
A hypothetical, though impractical, method to hinder the development of crimes of opportunity would be to have the interacting parties put each other on notice and enter into a contract. They would come to terms about how their expected interaction should proceed. They would document the agreement. They would deposit the agreement with a trusted third party. Then after the interaction (if successful), they would contact the third party to indicate that the expectations had been met and the agreement could be expunged. This type of formal process could hinder the development of crimes of opportunity, principally because there would be documentation of the interaction. Individual parties would be put on notice that some minimal safe outcome, for example, was expected.
However, as a practical matter, such a process, as described, cannot generally be implemented because it takes too much time and trouble, and because it involves a possible third party. No one would do this for the many small, seemingly innocuous, interactions they have each day. In addition, personal privacy would be violated to varying degrees.
The current state of the art lacks a method to easily and quickly affect such transactions so as to ensure they take place as anticipated. There is currently no method or system of protocols and interactivity to allow for the rapid depositing of data, preemptively, to an escrow platform, from multiple device-independent users. In addition, there is no method to escrow data preemptively before any relevance of the data has been determined. And there is no method for a trusted solution to search data for future relevance. Furthermore, existing techniques generally provide no mechanism by which a party can be alerted or notified that data has been deposited on an escrow platform subject to future relevance. In short, there is no easy way to put someone on notice that an interaction has been documented, and may come under future review.